Steve Lopez: High fashion in the medicinal high business

The physician was wearing high heels, a tight-fitting white lab coat and lots of gold jewelry, which is not quite what you expect to see when you visit a pot doctor. Nor do you expect to see a chandelier the size of a Christmas tree in a waiting room decorated like an Indian palace.

Dr. Sona Patel told me that’s just who she is. Her Melrose Avenue office, she said, is designed in much the same way as her home in Hollywood.

You may be wondering what I’m doing in the office of yet another cannabis specialist, given my fruitful encounter last month with a physician in Glendale. That doctor had told me he knew nothing about back problems because he was a gynecologist, but he wrote me a marijuana recommendation after a 10-minute “exam.”